The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids

Suppose legislators represent districts of varying population, and their assembly's voting rule is intended to implement the principle of one person, one vote. How should legislators' voting weights appropriately reflect these population differences? An analysis requires an understanding of the relationship between voting weight and some measure of the influence that each legislator has over collective decisions. We provide three new characterizations of weighted voting that embody this relationship. Each is based on the intuition that winning coalitions should be close to one another. The locally minimal and tightly packed characterizations use a weighted Hamming metric. Ellipsoidal separability employs the Euclidean metric: a separating hyper-ellipsoid contains all winning coalitions, and omits losing ones. The ellipsoid's proportions, and the Hamming weights, reflect the ratio of voting weight to influence, measured as Penrose–Banzhaf voting power. In particular, the spherically separable rules are those for which voting powers can serve as voting weights.     

Judgment aggregation in search for the truth

We analyze the problem of aggregating judgments over multiple issues from the perspective of whether aggregate judgments manage to efficiently use all voters' private information. While new in judgment aggregation theory, this perspective is familiar in a different body of literature about voting between two alternatives where voters' disagreements stem from conflicts of information rather than of interest. Combining the two bodies of literature, we consider a simple judgment aggregation problem and model the private information underlying voters' judgments. Assuming that voters share a preference for true collective judgments, we analyze the resulting strategic incentives and determine which voting rules efficiently use all private information. We find that in certain, but not all cases a quota rule should be used, which decides on each issue according to whether the proportion of ‘yes’ votes exceeds a particular quota.     

双重股权结构如何影响审计定价？——基于在美中概股的实证研究

在科创板允许特殊表决权企业上市以及美国强化中概股公司审计监管的背景下,基于2005—2019年在美上市中概股公司数据,实证研究双重股权结构对审计定价的影响及其作用环境。研究发现,相较于单一股权结构,双重股权结构会显著提高审计定价;同时发现,在双重股权结构下,投票权和现金流权之间的分离程度与审计定价之间呈显著正相关关系。在控制内生性问题后,上述结论仍然成立。进一步研究发现,相较于其他双重股权结构公司,在经理人纵向兼任、低市场化程度地区的双重股权结构公司中,投票权和现金流权之间的分离程度对审计定价的提升作用更为显著。研究结论为双重股权结构的治理及监管提供了有益的经验参考和理论指导。     

Social Security Reform and Corporate Governance

Abstract

This paper considers implementation issues arising from potential reforms to the United States Social Security system. Many reform proposals involve individually invested accounts, but the corporate governance implications of such accounts have not been fully explored. Existing reform plans will result in a large fraction of votes being concentrated at one private fund manager. The implications for corporate governance and debt management under alternative fund management strategies are evaluated. The use of futures to construct synthetic investments could alleviate corporate governance and debt management problems.     

A note on Heckman-type corrections in models for zero expenditures

In Heien and Wessells (1990), a two-step estimation procedure, that makes use of Heckman-type corrections, is proposed to estimate consumption on household budget surveys. It is shown that this approach, which draws from switching regressions models, leads to inconsistent estimates.     

我国上市公司独立董事选聘机制的重构

我国独立董事选聘机制各环节的执行现状存在较多问题,结合股东平等和股权平等原则,研究表明:在提名环节,视上市公司的股权结构,制定符合企业自身需求的提名制度,是选聘机制各环节执行的保障。比如:由提名委员会提名,同时对大股东提名权进行限制;在选举任命环节,全面引入并强制执行累积投票制度;在罢免环节,完善正当程序,建立披露制度和补偿机制。     

Expressive voting with booing and cheering: Evidence from Britain

Previous work on Expressive Voting has focused on the desire of voters to express what they are for and thus who they are. But, often also as important, is the desire of voters to express what they are against, and who they are not. In this paper we extend the standard formulation of Expressive Voting to account for this possibility. Using data for the UK we find empirical evidence that the desire to boo has been increasingly important at recent elections. The implications of this for recent trends in political polarization are discussed.     

Political economy of taxation,debt ceilings,and growth

This study presents voting on policies, including labor and capital income taxes and public debt, in an overlapping-generations model with physical and human capital accumulation, and analyzes the effects of a debt ceiling on a government's policy formation and its impact on growth and welfare. The results show that the debt ceiling induces the government to shift the tax burdens from the older to younger generations, but stimulates physical capital accumulation and may increase public education expenditure, resulting in a higher growth rate. Alternatively, the debt ceiling is measured from the viewpoint of a benevolent planner and lowering the debt ceiling (i.e., tightening fiscal discipline) makes it possible for the government to approach the planner's allocation in an aging society.     

Kantian Equilibrium

Consider a game whose strategies are contributions. A strategy profile is a Kantian equilibrium if  no  player would like  all  players to alter their contributions by the  same multiplicative factor.  Kantian equilibria are Pareto efficient. We characterize the allocation rules on several domains of environments that can be implemented as Kantian equilibria. The concept unifies the  proportional solution  on production economies and the  linear cost-share equilibrium  on public-good economies. We study Kantian equilibrium in the prisoner's dilemma, in a voting problem, and in a political economy where redistribution is the issue. The Kantian dictum engenders considerable but not unqualified cooperation.